Niall
Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford
University) and the Center for European Studies (Harvard University)
has argued, in two recent Boston
Globe columns (July
17 and August
14, 2017) that “Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy are More
Similar Than You Think”:

Trump
is not handling this [North Korea] crisis much differently from the
way John F. Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis. JFK also talked
tough. At the same time, he applied diplomatic and military pressure,
showing himself willing to take the world to the brink of war if the
other side did not back down. That is pretty much what Trump is
doing.

However,
the now-declassified missile crisis tape recordings irrefutably
demonstrate that JFK persistently worked to prevent taking the world
to the brink of nuclear war. In fact, despite often harsh and
near-unanimous opposition from his closest advisers, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff and the bipartisan leaders of Congress, President Kennedy:

• refused
to mine international waters around Cuba because of the danger to
foreign, especially Soviet, ships and submarines

• refused
to provoke the USSR by including a declaration of war on Cuba in the
announcement of the naval quarantine

• refused
to extend the quarantine to Soviet aircraft flying to Cuba because
stopping a plane might require shooting it down

• refused
to further escalate tensions in Berlin by rebuffing Soviet demands to
inspect US trucks entering East Germany on their way to West Berlin

• refused
to seize a Soviet ship that had turned around to avoid challenging
the naval quarantine

• refused
to enforce the quarantine by attacking Soviet submarines in Cuban
waters with conventional depth charges (JFK did reluctantly approve
the use of so-called “practice” depth charges only after being
assured—erroneously
as it turned out—by
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and secretary of defense that they
would not damage the submarines)

• refused
to arm US photo reconnaissance planes flying over Cuba

• refused
to return Cuban or Russian ground fire on the U-2s

• refused
to initiate night surveillance over Cuba using flares because night
flares were usually deployed as the prelude to an attack

• refused
to launch air attacks on Soviet surface-to-air missile sites even
after an unarmed U-2 plane was shot down and the pilot killed

When
Kennedy met with the Joint Chiefs, he argued
that the USSR was already capable of
inflicting 80-100 million casualties in the US even without the
missiles in Cuba: “You’re talking about the destruction of a
country!” He insisted that attacking the missile sites was far too
dangerous since several ICBM launchers were already operational. He
openly expressed sympathy for the position of the NATO allies that
the US was obsessed with Cuba and that an attack on that island
nation would be an act of madness. “That’s just one of the
difficulties that we live with in life,” he reasoned, “like you
live with the Soviet Union and China.”

Kennedy made parallel
arguments to the leaders of Congress, several of whom demanded an
immediate invasion of Cuba regardless of the Soviet nuclear threat.
“If we go into, Cuba,” he warned, “we have to all realize that
we are taking a chance that these missiles, which are ready to fire,
won’t be fired. So is that really a gamble we should take? … if
we’re talking about nuclear war, then escalation ought to be with
at least with some degree of control … [because the missiles in
Cuba] could blow up fifteen cities in the United States.”

If Donald Trump is capable
of this kind of responsible, dispassionate and thoughtful leadership,
the world is still waiting to see it. Unless and until that happens,
equating the crisis leadership of Kennedy and Trump is profoundly
disingenuous and contrary to the incontrovertible historical
evidence.